Two interviews popped up today about the Diablo 3 Console and a write up of a Reaper of Souls interview from Gamescom. Neither has anything that’s exactly breaking news, but they do a good job shedding more light on various ongoing issues. The Console interview is Blizzard’s Matthew Burger speaking to a Toronto 640, a Canadian radio show about video games, and thanks to Radaway for the tip. The radio station page is here, and if the embedded widget below doesn’t work for you, listen here. The Diablo 3 interview begins at 51:32, runs for 15 minutes, and you can skip right to it.

It’s been two weeks since our last Diablo 3 Forum Watch since last week was busy enough with the Gamescom festivities, and interesting threads have multiplied since then, many of them spurred by Reaper of Souls. Here’s a quick survey of some of the more interesting ongoing conversations.

There’s been a lot of buzz in the forums since Gamescom about Loot 2.0 and the expansion, and how they’ll affect the game. Over the weekend, I had the chance to speak with some prominent members of the Self-Found community to hear their thoughts as well.

As the self-found / Ironborn style of play (and varieties thereof) grow in popularity, the issues of gold sinks and other in-game Diablo 3 Economy features come in for a closer look. Those systems in Diablo 3 are a sort of hybrid of design, meant to provide gold sinks and expenses for high level players enriched by trading in the Auction House, yet not meant to be totally unaffordable for casual players or the Ironborn. Is it working? Perhaps not:

The Diablo 3 Expansion is the perpetual topic of interest for everyone in the Diablo community, and since IGN coughed up an article focused on it today, we might as well have at it. The article gives some summary of the Diablo 3 plot and basic game features and suggests what we might see in the Expansion plot, but it’s not one of those, “my top ten expansion wish list features” forum posts.